Ensemble brings many their first theatrical experience

Creating A Stage For ChildrenThunderbird Theater expands season

Published 5:30 am, Thursday, August 26, 2004

Thunderbird Theater
has been producing shows for Houston's children for more than a decade, but people don't normally flock to see the group's seasonal or literature-based performances.

They don't need to.

Like a band of theatrical gypsies, the semi-professional actors of Thunderbird Theater are a road show. They take themselves, their makeup, props, costumes and brightly painted-fabric sets to any school, library or other paying venue in Harris County.

The group's headquarters — where phone calls for bookings end up — is wherever Bill O'Rourke is hanging his many hats as lead actor, director, manager, playwright. That's at his Meyerland home, but he plans to move this year to a house in Freedmen's Town in the Fourth Ward.

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Change is such a pervasive part of Thunderbird Theater's history that O'Rourke advises would-be patrons to check the www.tbirdth.com web site for a schedule that is frequently updated and bound to change as new bookings come in.

"We need more space," said O'Rourke, 53, who shares his home with the theater group's sets, props and costumes, including those of Molly's Dinosaur and the prehistoric brother of the dinosaur in that show.

Plays several characters

As himself or as any number of characters in Thunderbird Theater's productions, O'Rourke seems to have a lot of fun. He has a 1975 master's degree in fine arts from the
University of Denver
and hired on seven years ago as half of Thunderbird Theater's predecessor, Bill and Tek's
Excellent Theater
.

Tek Wilson, an actress known to audiences at Stages and other theatrical venues in Houston, takes on roles with Thunderbird Theater, such as the evil queen and stepmother of the title character in Snow White. The show, which is billed by the theater group as Houston's longest-running children's play, closed out the theater group's 2003-2004 season at the Atascocita Library. The role of Snow White was performed by Tiffany Grant, who does voice-overs for English-dubbed Japanese films.

O'Rourke played everyone else — narrator, dwarf, woodsman and handsome prince — aided by small volunteers from the audience as trees, wind, little wood-dwelling people. Encouraged by O'Rourke, children in the audience also joined hands to earnestly create a force for good and help Snow White recover from her poisoned-apple bite.

O'Rourke writes plays

He writes most of Thunderbird Theater's plays, offerings mostly inspired by holidays or literature that, in the past, have been only for pre-kindergarten to fifth-grade students. In the upcoming season for 2004-2005, the company's repertoire will be expanded to include
Don Quixote
and one of three plays — chosen by the first customer to book it — by
William Shakespeare
.

"The first school or library that buys one of our Shakespeare performances gets to pick the one we do," he said.

O'Rourke has done Shakespeare before, mainly what he calls "the Scottish play," an actor's superstitious reference to Macbeth, for Theatre Under the Stars about two years ago. He has performed the role of Bottom in a version of Midsummer Night's Dream he created that — while it might make some Shakespeare purists blanch — is more appropriate for fifth- through ninth-graders.

"Basically, you take out the four lovers — and things are simpler after that," he said.

He will be re-writing Don Quixote with the same audience in mind, he said. Presenting a children's production requires as much planning and preparation as any classic play performance for adults, he said.

Knows its audience

"You have to be ready to improvise and play along with whatever the children do," he said. "I'd say that in any show, maybe about 98 percent of the script stays as it was written."

Bill and Tek's Excellent Theater officially changed its name to Thunderbird Theater in 2002, giving its new name a Native American connotation, he said. Each season includes plays of Hispanic, African-American and other-ethnic interests, he said. This year, the Irish will be given a spotlight.

"But the majority of our audiences are Hispanic, so we do a Spanish play for Hispanic Heritage Month in September," he said.

First-time actors in Thunderbird Theater productions are paid $100 for about 20 hours of rehearsals and $30 per performance. That jumps up with each production, topping out at $150 for rehearsals and $50 for the "top echelon," people like O'Rourke and Wilson.

Thunderbird Theater isn't a nonprofit organization, he said, so that money paid to actors is repaid to the company from bookings, the schools that book the shows at $250 plus $1 for each child in the audience or a flat $300 for public libraries. Booking a second or third show gives the booking entity increasing discounts. A half-price discount is allowed if the subsequent shows are for the same production and on the same day as the first one.

Seasonal plays

Seasonal plays, such as
Clara's Dream
, is based on
TheNutcracker
, but its themes have been expanded by O'Rourke to include Kwanzaa and Hanukkah, as well as Christmas Eve. A Thunderbird Theater subsidiary that has applied for nonprofit status, New Leaf Players, presents religious-oriented shows in the halls and temples of Houston's places of worship, O'Rourke said.

Attention is always paid to audience sensitivities, he said, such as in the creation of the puppets and costumes used in Molly's Dinosaur, in which the actors' faces are shown so that they will be less frightening.

First encounters

O'Rourke and other actors who perform with Thunderbird Theater productions are often presenting their young audience's first encounter with theater of any kind, a responsibility they take seriously, he said.

As Wilson made her entrance as the evil queen in Snow White, a small child cried out and tried to disappear into her mother's arms.

But as the play went on and became more audience friendly and interactive, the child volunteered to wear a "dwarf hat" and cheer for the heroine to finally awaken from her apple-induced sleep.

"Snow White becomes a happy, colorful fairy tale, with some of the rougher parts rewritten," O'Rourke said. "The point is for the children to enjoy theater."